Nightmare Fuel / Twilight Struggle

• The setting itself. After WW2, there are only two major players left in the world: the USA and the USSR, and the struggle between them immediately begins to fill the resulting power vacuum with their influence. At the same time, the methods used by both sides treat countries as nothing more than squares on the world chess board. This includes military coups, which it is impossible to do without collateral deaths, as well as realignments, when pressure is exerted on the government of the country only because of their foreign policy orientation. Even a simple placement of influence has its dark side: no country can oppose this action and remain neutral. But the greatest horror is undoubtedly the risk of the outbreak of nuclear war, when humanity will have neither hope nor the opportunity to atone for its mistakes. Considering the fact that in most games DEFCON stays at 2 most of the time (a minimal deterioration of the geopolitical situation is enough to start the hot phase of the war), one can imagine in what fear and paranoia the citizens of both superpowers live. In real history, the DEFCON level was almost always no lower than 3. At the same time, if both superpowers deliberately go for the degradation of the DEFCON level in the headline phase, then most often this means the end of human civilization on Earth as we know it, but only one player is counted as defeated. The second player receives a DEFCON victory, which prompts, in certain circumstances, to purposefully try to end the Cold War in the most dramatic way.
• War cards mechanic. While some countries of the world are battlegrounds, which only indicates their key position compared to all others, some countries become battlegrounds in the literal sense. The very existence of a conflict on the scale of an entire war is already a national catastrophe. Even worse, if the initiator of the conflict wins the war, such a superpower will be able to add all the influence of the opponent in the country to its own, and sometimes it will be several times greater than the indicator of the country's stability. This in itself puts such a country in complete dependence on one of the superpowers, which creates all the conditions for the formation of an ultra-dogmatic Far-Left (if pro-Soviet) or Far-Right and/or anti-communist (if pro-American) regime, which will maintain its power through endless repressions against dissent, approximately as it was in Cambodia under Pol Pot or in Chile under Augusto Pinochet, respectively.